Tabehoudai Shabu Shabu

Today I spent the day with my family. After a late breakfast we headed out for shopping and a late lunch. For the shopping part—I found some cute, cheap dishes that would be very expensive to get in America. For lunch we had shabu shabu.

Like the oden I showed you yesterday (here), shabu shabu is a type of hot pot. The difference between oden and shabu shabu is that oden has you cooking the food for a long time and then serving it, while shabu shabu has you putting the ingredients in and eating immediately. "Shabu shabu" is actually an onomopoeia for the sound of meat swishing around in the liquid, according to Wikipedia.

It's separated into "plain" (just water and konbu) and "spicy" (though you can get other flavors) so you can decide which type you want. You put the food in, wait about a minute for it to cook and then take it out and place it in a little bowl filled with broth from whichever side you're eating from

The little bowls--spicy in the front, grated daikon, chives and soy sauce in the back

 But the prettiest thing about the whole shop was where you got the ingredients for your shabu shabu.

This is

somewhat considered

fast food.

The shop we went to was having a tabehoudai (食べ放題all you can eat) and so we all gorged ourselves. Perhaps too much in Hina-chan’s case! She had a bit of a cookie toss near the end of the meal and the wait staff was amazing in providing us with stuff to clean up. I haven’t seen such professionalism in a long time. There was also the part where I mixed up the words for “toilet” (お手洗い otearai) and “handtowel” (手根食いtennegui) during Hina-chan’s upset. That was slightly amusing in retrospect. Of course, at the time, I was trying to get a wet towel for Okaasan (who Hina had thrown up on), and getting pointed to the toilet was befuddling before I realized what I was saying wrong. :)

So yeah, fun day (at least until the end!).

ETA: realized that this was, in fact, not nabe, but shabu shabu instead. Fixed! 2-24-12